Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied accusations from former employee Frances Haugen of the company’s pursuit of profit and lack of user care.
“We take care of issues such as safety, well-being and mental health seriously,” reads a post published on the businessman’s personal Facebook page. He added that Haugen’s accusations paint a false image of the company, and many of its statements “do not make sense at all.”
On the eve of the former manager of the company, Frances Haugen, said during a hearing in the US Senate that the largest social network in the world systematically puts profit above the safety of its users and ignores research on the dangers of content published in it for children. Facebook also relies too much on AI to combat hate speech, misinformation and inappropriate advertising for minors, she said.
Haugen, who has worked at Facebook since 2019 and quit this May, has downloaded thousands of secret company documents, including internal research. One of them, for example, claims that the platform took action against only 3-5% of hate speech and 0.6% of content that was classified as “violence and incitement.” The authors of another found that Facebook-owned social network Instagram exacerbates problems with the perception of their physical image in every third teenage girl.
“If we want to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues (safety and mental health – Vedomosti) in the first place? – answered Zuckerberg in his post. “If we don’t care about fighting malicious content, why would we hire so many people to do it?”
The 37-year-old entrepreneur also denied allegations of insufficient efforts to combat the hate speech. “The argument that we are deliberately promoting content that makes people angry for profit is profoundly illogical,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We make money from ads, and advertisers keep telling us that they don’t want their ads to be near harmful or hateful content. And I don’t know of a single tech company that wants to create products that make people angry or depressed, ”he continued.
Zuckerberg also noted that today teens are actively using technology, and technology companies should not ignore this fact, but develop products that respond to their needs and at the same time ensure their safety. That’s the idea behind Messenger Kids, a kid-friendly messaging app similar to Facebook Messenger with a number of restrictions and “soft” parental controls, he said.
According to Zuckerberg, the government should issue “updated rules for the Internet” with revised provisions on elections, malicious content, privacy and competition. In May 2020, however, he opposed tightening control over social media activities, saying that this could lead to their censorship.
.